Jazz

All About Jazz is celebrating Wynton Kelly's birthday today!
His family moved from the island of Jamaica to Brooklyn, New York City when Kelly was four, and he started his professional career as a teenager, initially as a member of R&B groups. After working in the big band and small groups led by Dizzy Gillespie, he was a member of Miles Davis\' Quintet from 1959 to 1963. Wynton Kelly was one of the most prolific sideman pianists of his era, performing on scores of jazz albums... Read more...

All About Jazz is celebrating Jaco Pastorius' birthday today!
"Jaco" was born John Francis Pastorius III, the first of three sons born to John Francis Pastorius II and Stephanie Katherine Haapala Pastorius. He had Finnish, German, Swedish, and Irish ancestry. Although "Jaco" was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, the family subsequently moved to Fort Lauderdale. Jaco went to elementary and middle school at St. Clement\'s Catholic School in Wilton Manors... Read more...

This week, let&#39;s look at some videos featuring pianist Geoffrey Keezer, who&#39;s coming to St. Louis to perform on Thursday, December 13 at the HQ of pianist Peter Martin&#39;s Open Studio, which is in the Centene Center for the Arts, 3547 Olive St. in Grand Center.
Originally from Eau Claire, WI, Keezer, 48, was something of a teenage phenom, joining Art Blakey&#39;s Jazz Messengers when he was just 18 years old. Since then, he&#39;s gone on to work with many well-known musicians and singers, including Christian McBride, Joe Locke, Denise Donatelli, Joshua Redman, Ray Brown, Art Farmer, Benny Golson, Chris Botti, David Sanborn, Jane Monheit, Wayne Shorter, Sting, and more...

As an artist striving for success, you're doubtless putting in countless hours of blood, sweat, and tears, but even working as hard as you do, it's easy to make career derailing mistakes. Here we look at five of the most common ones.
Guest post by Angela Mastrogiacomo of the Symphonic Blog
As an artist, you have a lot to be proud of. You're honing your creative talents and sharing your gifts with the world. Odds are you're pretty hard working and generous with your time and resources as well, all of which are awesome...

While the vast majority of us rely on Google for our searching needs, we're also aware of a few other engines like Bing and Yahoo, as well as some other outliers. One major search engine artists over look when focusing on making their music discoverable, however, is the Russian search engine Yandex...

All About Jazz features a free song every day spanning all genres of jazz, and of the 30 tracks featured in November, these ten represent our personal favorites. We also included the top ten reader favorites as indicated by total listens.
Musicians and record labels can submit full length MP3s for consideration here...

Pianist-composer m: Brittany Anjou blends the influences of a wide range of jazz and classical piano, and a fascination with the Esperanto language, on her stunning debut Enami?o Reciprokataj, set for a February 15 release on Origin Records. A trio album featuring bassist Greg Chudzik and drummer Nicholas Anderson (as well as two tracks with special guests, bassist Ari Folman-Cohen and drummer Ben Perowsky), it also includes 10 original compositions, highlighted by an eponymous five-part suite that showcases both Anjou's ambition and her originality...

All About Jazz is celebrating Jack Sheldon's birthday today!
Along with Lester Young in the 30s, Dizzy Gillespie in the 40s, and Zoot Simms in the 50s, Jack Sheldon is one of the Original Lions of the West Coast Sound. Jack\'s a premier improviser, is one of only a handful of trumpet players throughout jazz history who has developed his own distinctive "signature sound". It\'s an inimitable sound that comes from his heart and soul, what Miles Davis called "a voice"... Read more...

while musical integrity is often (as it should be) an artist's number one priority, musicians still need to make money, and there's no reason that same integrity can't extend through to the merchandise they sell. While higher quality merch may typically mean higher production costs, there are ways around such expenses...

While Sony, Universal and Warner are the music industry's biggest players, there is a lot more going on with the music business that doesn't involve these three giants, as Professor David Philp of William Paterson University explores.
Guest post by Professor David Philp of William Paterson University from the blog Music Biz 101...

Qobuz, which bills itself as the world's only certified hi-res streaming and download service, will launch in the US in early 2019. 40 million tracks will be available in 'lossless' quality (FLAC 16-Bit/44.1 kHz, similar to CD quality) and in 320kbps MP3 quality along with extensive meta-data and additional content...

The Library of Congress announced today that it has acquired the original manuscripts documenting the work of composer, arranger and pianist Billy Strayhorn. An important star in the jazz firmament, Strayhorn was the source of much of the sound of the m: Duke Ellington Orchestra. He worked with Ellington for nearly 30 years, writing or collaborating on more than 200 tunes and arrangements for the band. Strayhorn wrote the orchestra's signature tune, 'Take the 'A' Train...

All About Jazz is celebrating Chuck Mangione's birthday today!
For more than five decades, Chuck Mangione\'s love affair with music has been characterized by his boundless energy, unabashed enthusiasm, and pure joy that radiates from the stage. Mangione first attracted attention with his brother, Gap, in a mainstream jazz band, The Jazz Brothers, in which he played trumpet much like that of the man who he refers to as his musical father-Dizzy Gillespie... Read more...

In this piece Chaz Jenkins explains why implementing a broader approach to analytics is key to an effective marketing strategy, and why only looking at past data simply doesn't provide enough information.
Guest post by Chaz Jenkins of ChartMetric
On my first day in a new role a few years back, a colleague asked whether I'd like to see the marketing reports. A little later, they handed me a couple of sheets of paper with sales and streaming figures for the previous day, week, month and quarter. I asked if I could also have the marketing reports they'd mentioned, only to be told that what I was already holding them. Hmmmm...

Here we explore how both forward thinking entrepreneurial artists and music tech companies like Bandsintown are pushing the envelope on how they market themselves in order to launch successful tours.
Guest post from AWAL
'I don't like the VIP section. I prefer the mosh pit.'
You won't find Fabrice Sergent backstage, or, god forbid, pressed against a venue's back wall, arms crossed, in the mix with an industry crowd. The music-tech exec's path to co-founding Bandsintown Group begins with late-night raves. Enraptured, early, by the transcendent bliss of the French-European electronic scene, Sergent treasured music as communion. In 2011, he shifted business ambitions to his true love -- live -- after helping build internet startups in the late '90s. It's been a fruitful decade...

While we like to think artwork doesn't define an album, it is an opportunity to create something which compliments the themes and emotions expressed on the album and, best of all, compels a potential listener to purchase it. Here we look at five psychology hacks for upping your album art game.
Guest post by Berta Melder from the TuneCore Blog...

The season of giving is here, and while the holiday season may mean fans buying more music and merch for each other, it can also be a great opportunity for artists to give back to their most devoted listeners.
Guest post from Haulix Daily
Thanksgiving is basically here, and before long you will see images of Santa Claus everywhere (if you haven't already). With Halloween behind us, retailers and marketers have wasted no time making it clear that the gift-giving season is upon us...

All About Jazz is celebrating Gigi Gryce's birthday today!
Gigi Gryce was born George General Grice(sic) on 28th November, 1925 (not 1927) in Pensacola, Florida- although he was brought up in Hartford, Connecticut. He spent a short period in the Navy where he met musicians such as Clark Terry, Jimmy Nottingham and Willie Smith, who were to turn his thoughts from pursuing medicine to the possibility of making music for a living... Read more...